3 Quanta, Relativity, and Rhetoric By Way of Prologue Rhetoric in Science? To a scientist, the very phrase has ail the signs of an oxymoron. Since ancient times rhetoric has been essentially the art of persuasion, in contrast to the art of demonstration. Of all the claims of modern science, perhaps the strongest is to have achieved, in painful struggle over the past four centuries, an "ob­ jective" method of demonstrating the way nature works, of finding and reporting facts that can be believed regardless of the individ­ ual, personal characteristics of those who propose them, or of the audience to which they are addressed. This distinction of the roles of objectivity and subjectivity is clear in Aristotle's JRAgfon'ca.*' Of the three kinds of "modes of persuasion" available to the speaker relying on rhetoric, only the third "depends on the proof, or appar­ ent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself," whereas "the first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker, and the second on putting the audience in a certain [right] frame of mind." Indeed, the chief rhetorical weapon is the speaker's inherent moral character: We believe good men more fully and more readily than others . It is not true . that the personal goodness revealed by the speaker contributes nothing to his power of persuasion; on the contrary, his character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion he possesses. Science had to find the escape from this moralizing and personaliz­ ing mode of discourse and invent means of persuasion other than the probity or the stylistic ruses of the presenter. As if to underline 74 QUANTA, RELATIVITY, AND RHETORIC that this self-denying ordinance is one of the criteria of demarca­ tion of science, Robert Hooke's draft preamble to the original stat­ utes of the Royal Society of London specifically disavowed that the scientists intended to "meddle" with "Rhetoric." Since about the midseventeenth century, the writings of scientists have increasingly reflected their agreement with such admonitions. Thus Newton adopted for his Pn'Mcfpz'a a structure that suggested parallels with that exemplary model of objectivity, Euclid's presentation of ge­ ometry, and he opened the first book of his Opticas with the impli­ cation that the work is free from conjecture, analogy, metaphor, hyperbole, or any other device that might be identified with the rhetorician's craft. Rather, Newton says, "My Design in this Book is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses, but to pro­ pose and prove them by Reason and Experiments."^ The well-tested machinery of logic and analysis, the direct evi­ dence of the phenomena—who can resist these? Who would need more? Newton and the scientists who came after liked to be consid­ ered little more than conduits through which the book of nature spoke directly, across the great divide between the independent, outer world of phenomena and the subjective, inner world of the observer. But because they are in consonance with the "Tenor and Course of Nature,"^ their reports are free from the vagaries and limitations of mere humans. In Alexander von Humboldt's phrase, they should be the results of observation, stripped of all "charms of fancy." Or at least, as Louis Pasteur advised his students—and as is current practice in any research article submitted to a science journal—"Make it look inevitable." Here indeed there does reveal itself a connection with the final aim of the old rhetoric. For as Aristotle noted, the most desirable of the various propositions of rhetoric is the "infallible kind," the "complete proof" (t&qrrtptov): "When people think that what they have said cannot be refuted, they think they are bringing forward a 'complete proof,' meaning that the matter has now been demon­ strated and completed.'"* Thus alerted, we now remember that a number of recent investigations by historians of science have shown that at least a work has ripened into publication, during its nascent period, traditional rhetorical elements, such as conjecture, analogy, metaphor, and even the willing suspen­ 75 SCIENCE AND ANTI-SCIENCE sion of disbelief, can be powerful aides to the individual scientist's imagination.^ Therefore it is reasonable to ask whether some of the dramatic repertoire is not, after all, used—and perhaps even neces­ sary—in the resulting publication also. Indeed, I shall propose here and try to make persuasive by illus­ tration a view different from and complementary to the usual way of reading a historic scientific paper. It is this: The publication is not only the author's account of the outcome of the struggle with nature's secrets—which is the publication's main purpose and chief strength, hence the scientist's preferred interpretation—but it may also be read as the record of a discourse among several "Ac­ tors," whose interplay shapes the publication. And as we shall see, in that respect it is analogous to the script of a play in which a number of characters appear, each of whom is essential to the total dramatic result/ In using the word I stress that I am not proposing that we may or even can choose between these two ways of reading. The second will not detract in any way from the achievement in­ tended by the first. We shall simply be looking at the presentations of scientists not chiefly from the viewpoint of their properly in­ tended prime audience, but as it were orthogonally, as seen from the wings. However, we must not expect that the existing pub­ lished scientific work will make it any simpler to discern its internal rhetoric than it has been to derive from it the original motivation or the actual steps that led to the final result. Indeed, rare is the scien­ tist who helps the historian or philosopher of science to penetrate beyond the mask of inevitability, to witness what Einstein called "the personal struggle," to glimpse the various influences—bio­ graphic, thematic, institutional, cultural, etc.—that gave birth to a publication. We cannot expect otherwise, for there are good sociological rea­ sons for that neglect and impatience. The very institutions of sci­ ence, the selection and training of young scientists, and the inter­ nalized image of science are all designed to minimize attention to the personal activity involved in publication. Indeed, the success of science as an intersubjective, consensual, sharable activity is con­ nected with the habit of silence in research publications about in­ dividual personal struggles. Hence the useful fiction that science 76 QUANTA, RELATIVITY, AND RHETORIC takes place in a two-dimensional plane bounded by the phenome- nic axis and the analytic axis, rather than in a three-dimensional manifold that includes the thematic dimension/ Moreover, the ap­ parent contradiction between the sometimes illogical-seeming na­ ture of actual discovery and the logical nature of well-developed physical concepts is being perceived by some scientists and philos­ ophers as a threat to the very foundations of science and to ratio­ nality itself. (The vogue to attempt, by a "rational reconstruction" of a specific case, to demonstrate how a scientific work should have been done seems to have been so motivated.) Still, we shall learn how to read with minutest attention what a scientific author says or does not say, look also for unstudied evidence, and instead of settling only for the surface-reading that the publication invites, peer also behind the mask of inevitability. Works of literary or political intent have been subjected to an analysis of rhetorical elements for over two and a half millennia. Now we shall begin to distinguish the corresponding elements in the discourse of and about science: in the nascent phase during which the scientists weigh the persuasiveness of their ideas to themselves; in their published results; in the debates about these; in biographical and autobiographical writings of scientists; in scientific textbooks; and also in the uses made of scientific findings in controversies—a second-order phenomenon, a "rhetoric about rhetoric." Rhetoric of Assertion vs. Rhetoric of Appropriation / Rejection Comparing a scientific paper with the various responses to it makes it evident that, to begin with, one must distinguish between a pro­ active Rhetoric of Assertion and a reactive Rhetoric of Appropria­ tion / Rejection. The first of these expresses that about which a sci­ entist has convinced himself or herself, and hopes to persuade others of, when writing the publishable version of the work. The second characterizes the responses to it by contemporaries and later readers—responses that, we should note, are shaped in turn by the responders' own commitments to their own Rhetoric of Assertion. The success or refusal of recognition, or its delay, as 77 SCIENCE AND ANTI-SCIENCE well as misplaced reinterpretation even by those who thought of themseives as converts, can thus be understood in terms of a match or mismatch between key elements in each of these two types of rhetoric. Foremost among these key elements in many cases in the history of science are thematic commitments: those of the originator and those of the critics or opponents or would-be disciples. Since the­ matic commitments are not always consciously held, we are there­ fore often forced into a quasi-archeological task: to dig below the visible landscape of a controversy in order to hnd the usually invis­ ible but highly motivating matches, mismatches, and clashes be­ tween the respective sets of themata that have been adopted by the various participants—and not only of the individual themata, but also of constellations of them that define the locally held scientific world pictures. Such correspondences and conflicts can be consid­ ered as interactions among contesting claimants in what Michel Foucault has termed "rhetorical space.